


suite for four hands

by hieronyma



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Psychological Horror, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 04:57:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2495279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieronyma/pseuds/hieronyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A visit in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	suite for four hands

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a longer fic I started writing before the show aired that will likely never see the light of day, but I think this chunk stands well enough on its own. Post-Red Dragon, pre-Hannibal.

Chopin’s Nocturne in G minor, Op. 37, No. 1, is playing soft and dark in the background of Will’s home, on the cherry Crosley CR72 he got for his thirtieth birthday. The vinyl is one Hannibal bought for him as a Christmas gift: _The Chopin Collection_ , Rubenstein. Will had played it only once before, fumbling the record onto the turntable, recalling with vivid clarity the way his mother had placed the needle down on their family gramophone back in Shiloh—she’d liked to play Billie Holiday when Will came back from school, or Jimmie Davis. _Lady Sings the Blues_ , low volume. He’d sit down to do his homework at the kitchen table and let it filter through the tip of his pen, head bowed, wondering why she couldn’t just use the dumb radio instead and resenting how much he came to enjoy it.

It was on New Year’s Eve when Will had found time to listen to the Nocturnes, feeling every bump and scratch and resonating chord, imagining almost how it might have been to play the music, envisioning a blurry image of himself seated in someone else’s skin, someone else’s hands deftly coaxing out the cascade of notes with every spidery press of a key; he could have been Chopin, he could have been Rubenstein—he could have been Hannibal, who had sometimes played short adagios on the Fazioli tucked into the corner of his living room. 

But listening to music isn’t unlike looking at the bright gash of a crime scene. Notes rise, fall. Emotions flutter. Will remembers: Hannibal, drawn up tall at his side, staring evenly at a headless, limbless, bloodless torso. There’s a melody to murder, a violent suite; each note a cry for help, a stab wound, a gaping hole where flesh used to be, punched inwards, ragged edges and loose threads. He feels it acutely. Every time he sees a corpse, he can understand why; he understands how a fountain of blood can be beautiful, how a struggling victim can be arousing, pinned underneath a heavier weight, a pounding succession of notes, of a fist, the shrill high scream, a violin, or a woman, or a young woman, a girl, her father standing over her, cutting, cutting—

Will doesn’t listen to classical music much. Never had a taste for it. He hasn’t played this record since that one New Year’s Eve; he hasn’t touched anything Hannibal had given him, not even to throw it away. He can’t look at a piano the same way again. He’ll always see Hannibal sitting at the keys, posture-perfect, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, speckled forearms, red hands, slippery fingers. Measure 39. 40. 41. Key change.

When the door swings shut, he toes off his shoes and walks to the kitchen to pour himself a drink. His hands don’t shake. Two fingers of whiskey in a cracked scotch glass. It goes down hot and smooth, the tangy burn of spice prickling on his tongue, stabbing up into his brain and down, down into his stomach. 

His skin is crawling. His mind is curiously blank. Will feels—doesn’t see, doesn’t look—feels him walk up from behind, a faceless presence in creaking Italian leather (not socks, not this time, not hooves nor heels nor gunshots) because he's not going to look, he can’t bring himself to make this _real_ —not that anything is, nothing is. Not this.

Then there are hands at his neck, curving around his throat.

Will stands frozen—by choice—but the hands don’t squeeze, they just rest there, gently, as if contemplating the follow-through. It must be tempting. He’d done more than enough to warrant it.

He feels the pads of the fingers trace up his Adam’s apple, to the sharp line of his jaw, scratchy and thick with unshaven beard growth—and then to his cheek, slightly concave, deformed with scar tissue and foreign flesh. The touch is cool, careful, pressing soft and steady into Will’s skin. The thumbs find the smooth-scarred ridges of Will’s cheekbones and pause there for a moment, cradling the asymmetrical angles of his face, before falling back to trace the curve of Will’s ears—pinching the helixes, then the lobes, then stroking the soft, unmarred skin just where the hair starts to grow.

Will is sweating. It catches on the fingers; they smear it back into his skin.

 _You haven’t been taking care of yourself, Will,_ Hannibal Lecter says, his breath stirring the gray hairs at Will’s temple.

Will knows it. He fucking knows that, you son of a bitch; you don’t have to tell him what he already knows. 

Hannibal coaxes him gently, encouraging him to crane his head back. Will’s mouth falls open a little in a hiss, a hint of teeth, breathing a plume of whiskey-scented breath into the air. He stares into the backs of his own eyelids, unseeing. Hannibal’s hands drop to his shoulders and ease the tension out of them, expertly kneading the muscle until it hurts—until Will groans, rough like gravel, like a dying animal.

_Come._

Hannibal takes his elbow. He leads Will to the bathroom and has him stand in front of the mirror—but facing away from it, the small of his back pressed up against the sink. Hannibal reaches around Will to turn on the faucet and stop the drain, and the bathroom fills with the sound of white noise as the sink slowly fills with tap water. Will shivers a little, a wave of cold over damp skin. Hannibal is close enough to smell his breath, to smell his unwashed body, the thick odor of perspiration and bile. No aftershave. Not for a long time.

It must disgust him, Will thinks. Well, he wouldn't be the only one. 

Hannibal's palms, wet and warm, touch his face. The dampness sinks into Will's skin, loosens his pores. He sprays Will’s brand name shaving cream into his hands and lathers them up, swiping the stuff against the coarseness of Will’s beard with perfunctory efficiency, against the grain in broad wipes. Will lets it happen. He holds his head still, his mouth shut. If he opens his eyes he’ll want to knock Hannibal’s hands away, shoot him with the gun on his bedside table, one-two- _nine_ -ten, ten shots. Blood in the shaving foam, flecked across tile. He can stand being touched when he’s not looking. This is what he tells himself. 

Hannibal uses the cheap Gillette stuck into a glass toothbrush holder, the one next to a battered tube of toothpaste. He grabs Will’s chin firmly in hand and holds him still as he works the razor over the coarse hair and lather, whisking it in the sink, beginning again, shave, rinse. It’s all with the practiced delicacy of a man who has held his knife against less docile prey; blood is not drawn. He doesn’t handle Will like a scared animal. He handles Will like a child. Somehow that’s worse. 

Hannibal wipes the last trace of foam from the corner of Will’s mouth, across his upper lip. His thumb presses against the dip beneath Will’s bottom lip. No nicks. No cuts. Smooth skin. 

Will drifts a little when Hannibal’s hands leave his face. He grips the sides of the sink, uses it as an anchor, the porcelain beneath his palms now slippery and warm as he waits, and waits. The noise of the shower sputtering to life doesn’t startle him; it seems like a natural progression. Backwards, maybe. Shave. Shower. 

Hannibal has him stand in the center of the bathroom and peels his sweat-soaked clothing off of his body in layers: sleeves, unrolled. Shirt unbuttoned. Removed. Folded. Belt, unbuckled, sliding out of belt loops, curled into a spiral. Slacks, unbuttoned, unzipped. Spidery hands on his hips, thumbs hooking into the waistband of his old, faded boxers, easing the clothing down over his cock, thighs, knees, shins, ankles—until the hands encourage him to step out of them, fingers curled in the dip at the back of his knee, each leg rising and falling, bending. Pure mechanical movement. The slacks and boxers are then taken and folded; Will doesn’t know where Hannibal’s put them, can barely hear the sound of his own breathing over the static of running water. Beads of sweat roll down his back, the backs of his legs, prickling the insides of his thighs. The air is warm and thick and humid, and Will’s limbs are heavy with exhaustion.

Hannibal guides him into the shower with a hand hot on the base of his spine and leaves him there. Will’s not sure how long he stays under the spray, letting it hit him in the face and chest (needles, shards, glass, a fountain of blood billowing beneath his feet) but it’s long enough that his fingers begin to prune, long enough for the water to run cool, and then, finally, cold. 

Hannibal drapes a towel over his shoulders and leads him downstairs to the couch. He makes him sit. The air feels cool and foreign over his clean, scrubbed jaw, the lines in his sunken cheeks and face and around his mouth deeper, more apparent. 

He sinks back into the cushions and still doesn’t open his eyes, and just breathes, and listens to the clinking of bottles, of cupboard and cabinet doors opening and closing, and drifts, and drifts, and falls asleep to the terrible, suffocating chords of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 48, No. 1, in C minor. He is not in any definable place. There are trees, but they rise from the soil like antlers, twisting up to gut the sky. The only leaves are on the ground, crushed and mangled. The clouds are red. The hart is red. It bounds through the underbrush, fluid like a cat, like its limbs are not jointed. It knows how to run.

Will chases it. His breath coats the air with mist. He raises his nose to smell the air, but there is only the cloying scent of copper and salt, of dead wood. He opens his mouth into the wind and keeps running. He’s getting tired, but he can’t stop; he’s already in motion. He stumbles, his four legs catching on sticks of bone and ichor, his slick flank pierced with thorns. He is full of hot blood and teeth and hands and he slices himself on curved blades, standing up straight from the bloodied soil like antlers, like twisted tree branches, puncturing the sky until it dribbles out thick red rivulets of rain—drip. drip. drip. splatter. The hart is braced to run, stopped, looking at him. He catches up. He stands up.

Will’s fingers slide through the hart’s coat. Its feathers are sticky, slick. Underneath the red is black; a shiny black, a raven’s black. His hand comes away coated in warm, living blood, and it crawls up his knuckles like little worms, up his arm, up his chest and neck, into his mouth, and down his throat. It fills his stomach, and then punches its way through the rest of his body—he can taste the flesh of Cassie Boyle.

It is no longer a hart. It is a great Red Dragon. 

Will is frozen. Its claw reaches, and reaches, and the sharp point of it goes into the space beneath Will’s eye and out the back of his head.

He wakes up drenched in cold sweat.

All of his whiskey is gone, his kitchen clean. He stands in his empty apartment and doesn’t touch his face, but remembers clearly, purely, the way Hannibal had; the scalding, comforting touch of a ghost, whose face Will never saw, but whose voice still stains the air a dark, musky red. _Fuck_ , he thinks, his gun hand shaking. _Fuck._


End file.
